


Clink, Tap, Shoot

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alcohol, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood and Violence, Clubbing, Hurt/Comfort, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, POV Keith (Voltron), Space Dad Shiro (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 06:17:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17074976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lance had never been ‘clubbing’, which was what he called it whenever they landed anywhere new, and he asked ‘Hey, what’s the clubbing scene like on this planet?’. The answer was always an exasperated, ‘They don’t have a clubbing scene, Lance. This is a mining colony.’(Lance goes clubbing and bad things happen)





	Clink, Tap, Shoot

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first voltron fic i haven't even finished the show i hear y'all are on fire tho?

“They’re not gonna let us in,” said Keith, sounding huffy. This had not, after all, been his idea.

“Drinking age on Zepiton is eighteen.” Shiro was on his communicator, assuring Allura. “I’ll have them back in a tick. No, um, not an actual tick. It’s just a saying… I don’t know, maybe a few vargas?”

“ _We gonna be out all night, baby!_ ” Lance shouted into the communicator, deafening Shiro and probably anybody on the other end.

Shiro closed the communicator and gave Lance the Look, a kind of ‘don’t make me call your mother, and also I am your mother’ look. This hadn’t been his idea, either. He was there for the usual reason, which was to keep everyone from getting themselves killed on a strange planet. Specifically, keep Lance from getting himself killed on a strange planet.

“ _WhoooooOOO!_ ” said Lance, who was the reason they were on Planet Amsterdam in the first place. Not for the first time, Keith covered his ears.

Lance had never been ‘clubbing’, which was what he called it whenever they landed anywhere new, and he asked ‘Hey, what’s the clubbing scene like on this planet?’. The answer was always an exasperated, ‘They don’t _have_ a clubbing scene, Lance. This is a mining colony.’ Pidge and Keith usually took turns saying it.

This time, Pidge and Hunk had found better things to do, Pidge being underage even for Planet Amsterdam, and Hunk experimenting with a new recipe that apparently required total peace and quiet in order not to ‘disturb the slumbering flan’. So of course Lance had to be off the ship. Coran and Allura had heard the name Zepiton, swapped looks, and suddenly thought of several things they had to get done around the castle.

And Keith?

He had gotten roped into it. Was anyone surprised?

“Try to relax,” said Shiro, clapping him on the shoulder. In front of them, Lance was hopping up and down to try and see the front of the line. Neon signs illuminated the dingy street, full of various alien species wearing either their worst or their best. It was impossible to tell. An insectoid thing looked Keith up and down, and he returned them a dirty look. “It’ll be fun.”

“‘Fun’?” repeated Keith. “What’s fun about watching a bunch of aliens getting wasted? Or Lance trying to dance?”

“Watching me trying to dance,” said Shiro, doing the robot.

“How are you so bad at that? You have a literal robot arm.”

Shiro stopped, grinning. “Long years of practice.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked up towards the front of the line. There was something nostalgic in his eyes. It made Keith suspicious.

“When was the last time you went clubbing?” he asked.

“It’s never really been my thing,” said Shiro. “You know me, Keith. I had other stuff to worry about.” He waved it off. “Lance will have a few drinks, get a hangover, and swear off the whole thing. You’ll never have to watch either of us do the robot ever again. Promise.”

“Guys!” Lance grabbed them both by the sleeve. “The line is moving. Come on!”

When they made it to the front of the line, there was a bit of a hold up, where Shiro had to argue with the bouncer (about eight foot tall, green, with six arms and three gold teeth) that their documents were valid and that no, they weren’t a larval form of another species, but legal adults.

“Come onnnnnnn,” said Lance, after having failed to bribe the bouncer with expired Vrepit Sal’s coupons. He slung an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “It’s his birthday.”

“Get off of me,” said Keith.

“Birthday, huh?” grunted the bouncer, looking them up and down, taking in Lance’s beaming face and Keith’s deep scowl. “Okay, go ahead.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” exulted Lance, still hanging off Keith’s shoulder as they made it through the entryway to the bar floor. They had to weave around aliens tall and short, spotted and beaked, leathery and beady-eyed. Lance zeroed in on the bar immediately. “How about some shots for the birthday boy?”

“It’s _not_ my birthday, and— _Shiro!_ ”

Shiro had disappeared for only a second, and reappeared with a tray of shots. The neon lights bouncing off the ceiling painted the white snip in his hair different colors. “Honestly, they just handed me these,” he said, too-innocent. “They must take birthdays very seriously on this planet.”

The club was dark, full of strobes and blacklights, not unlike an earth club. What was unlike earth was the dancing. A lot of it seemed more spastic, more violent, or more pulsating than anything Keith had ever seen. They found a booth in the back where they could look on, and Keith decided he wasn’t going to leave that spot for the entire night.

Lance reached for a shot glass, but Shiro reached out and covered it. “Quality control,” he said. “Let me double check these are safe for human consumption.” He picked it up, tilted his head, and tossed back the shot like it was his job.

Keith crossed his arms and looked at him.

Shiro turned the shot glass upside down and set it back on the table. “One hundred percent, Takashi Shirogane tested, and verified safe for human consumption.” He gestured. “Go ahead.”

Lance didn’t need telling twice. He grabbed a shot and slid another over to Keith. “Clink glasses with me,” he said. “Clink glasses with me, _please_ ,” he added, countering Keith’s resistance before he could even say no.

“I don’t think you clink shot glasses,” said Keith.

“Nope,” said Shiro. “It goes clink, tap, shoot.” He demonstrated, reaching for another shot. He lifted it up, mimed tapping it against another glass, “Clink,” tapped it on the tabletop, “Tap,” and “Shoot.” He tossed the second back as cleanly as the first.

“Are you sure you haven’t been clubbing before?” demanded Keith.

“Shots, now!” said Lance.

 _Clink._ They all clinked their glasses together in the air.

 _Tap._ They tapped them once on the tabletop.

_Shoot._

They downed them.

Lance put down the empty glass, and a visible crawl went up his spine. “Bbbbbbbblehhhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Why didn’t you say it was gonna be sour?” Keith was trying to keep his composure while his whole face tried to pucker up. It wasn’t just sour, it was hot, and it stayed hot the whole journey into his guts.

“Let’s get some more,” said Lance immediately.

“Slow down,” said Shiro. “You don’t know how hard that’s gonna hit you.”

“Please,” said Lance, with characteristic arrogance. “I’m a paladin of _Voltron_ , I can handle a little alcohol.”

—

“Sometimes, Keith, the best way to teach, is to allow your student to make the mistake for themselves.”

“You never taught _me_ anything by feeding me shots of Lamon Zip and setting me loose on the dancefloor.”

“Yeah, well, every student learns differently.”

The two of them watched Lance going buckwild under this planet’s equivalent of a disco ball, which was more like a chandelier, in the company of some tentacled types that were trying and failing to keep up with his frenetic dance energy. Lance had gotten a glow in the dark necklace from somewhere.

“I never had to teach you about holding your liquor… and don’t now, apparently.”

Keith had gone shot for shot with Lance, but he didn’t feel much more than a vague overall tingling and the need to pee. “Must be a Galra thing,” he said, trying to be light-hearted about it, but still feeling that little twinge of being abnormal.

Shiro’s kind eyes said _‘don’t worry about it’_. “One less drunk paladin for me to carry home,” he said.

“What about you?” Keith eyed the assortment of empty glasses. “You gonna be able to carry yourself home?”

Shiro waved his hand. “This is nothing. One time I—” He stopped himself.

“One time you what?” asked Keith.

“Next round’s on me,” said Shiro, pushing himself away from the table with a thumbs up.

“They’ve all been on you,” shouted Keith as Shiro disappeared back into the crowd. “One time you what? Stop holding out on me!”

But Shiro was gone. Scowling, Keith descended back into his seat.

Lance returned from the dancefloor to crash into the space Shiro had just vacated, and with him came two of the white tentacled things. Up close, they had spider faces. Their dozen eyes bounced light like miniature disco balls. They were holding a glow stick in each tentacle.

“This is Glehgngngn,” said Lance, red in the face, throwing an arm around first one, then the other. “And this is Helrhghglh. Glehgngngn, Helrhghglh, this is my buddy, Keith. It’s his birthday.”

“It is _not_ my birthday,” Keith started to say heatedly, but Lance interrupted him by trying to hop over the table to his side. He was mostly successful, except that he scattered shot glasses everywhere, and landed upside down.

Keith hauled him up by under the arms. “Are you serious right now?”

Glehgngngn and Helrhghglh picked up the discarded glasses and began trying to suction any leftovers drops out of the bottom of them.

“They gave me this.” Lance tried to show Keith his glow stick and almost shoved it up his nose. “Whooops.”

“That’s it.” Keith shoved Lance back into his chair. “When Shiro gets back, we’re leaving. I hope you had fun.”

Lance shrugged, one eye half closed, slumping against the table. “Whatever man, ‘s your party.”

Keith rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, but Lance didn’t notice. He was too busy collecting the fallen cups and trying to stack them in the shape of a pyramid. Keith checked his communicator in hopes of an emergency summons from the castle, but nothing.

“Whoa.” Shiro had returned. He had plastic cups and a pitcher of something frothy with pink bits floating in it. “Keith, did you do that?”

“What?”

Keith turned around just as Lance put the final touch on his shot glass pyramid; he had managed three tiers without knocking it over, with a savantlike focus that he never displayed behind the controls of his lion. For some reason, that pissed Keith off more than anything. And for some reason, maybe it was his human susceptibility to alcohol after all, maybe it was long suppressed irritation, or just childish spite, he reached over and knocked one of the bases of the pyramid out from under it.

The whole thing collapsed.

This time, when it all fell, some of the glasses actually broke.

Keith felt instant shame, but too late.

“Wow. Party foul,” said Helrhghglh.

“Keith!” admonished Shiro. He had the familiar look of ‘not angry, just disappointed’, but with maybe a little anger, the anger that usually came out to play when one of their number was hurt.

Lance wasn’t injured, except for a bump on his head from his hop over the table, but when Keith looked over at him, he could see every wrong ever done to Lance written on his face.

Oh god. Lance was a sad drunk.

“Sorry,” said Keith, too quickly, and too defensively. When they all looked at him, when Shiro’s disappointment and the spider eyes and Lance’s broken-hearted look hit him all at once, his skin crawled and he jumped up away from the table. “I said _I’m sorry!_ ” he shouted. His face felt hot.

He had to use the bathroom, anyway. He pretended that’s what he was doing, instead of running away

Keith wove in and out of the crowd, feeling a little better every step he got away from his friends, and also worse. He was almost glad when the bathroom turned out to cater to alien physiology, because it took him about twenty minutes to figure out how to pee, and that was twenty minutes he didn’t have to think about how he was a bad friend. Bad paladin. Bad person. Whatever.

When he came out, already loathing the failure of an apology he was going to make, he squeezed along the bar and looked up to see that the table he had left was empty.

“Hey.” He leaned over the bar to tap a bartender’s shoulder. “The humans who were sitting at that table, where’d they go?”

The bartender, another six armed eight footer (they seemed like the endemic species) looked down at him, unimpressed. “Who says I was paying attention?”

“Be nice,” said the female next to him, giving him a nudge. “It’s his birthday.”

“Oh it’s your birthday?” The bartender looked honestly apologetic. What was it with this planet and birthdays? “Hey, you want a free birthday shot?”

“No!” snapped Keith. “I don’t want any more shots. I’m looking for two people. People, like me, two arms, two legs. One is tall with some white hair, the other one is my height and annoying with brown hair.”

“I think the tall one was helping to carry out some broken dishes.” The female bartender fished in her huge teeth with a toothpick. “The other one— think he was headed your way.” She nodded back towards from where he’d come.

“Yeah,” piped up a voice. It was Helrhghglh, now carrying a dozen martinis in its many tentacles. “You know a Keith? He said he was going to look for Keith.”

“I _am_ Keith. Didn’t we like, just get introduced? Never mind.” He didn’t have time to be annoyed. “Which way did he go?”

“Out back, I think.” Helrhghglh shrugged with all their tentacles.

“Great,” Keith said under his breath.

He didn’t find Lance in the back, not on the dance floor or by the bathrooms. He made what he thought was a full circuit of the place before he started to get worried. Like an idiot, he had left his communicator back at the table, and like an idiot, by the time he thought to go looking for it, the table had already been cleared. It was filled up with white tentacled things, all staring vacantly at him.

“Have you seen a person like me, two arms, two legs, with brown hair?” he asked.

They all shrugged with all their tentacles.

On Keith’s third circuit of the bar, he headed for the kitchens. Just as he reached it, one of the six armed natives breezed out of the kitchen doors, passed him by, and went out a swinging back door. Keith caught a flash of the outdoors: an alleyway, dimly lit, a bunch of trash cans, and a single glow stick lying on the ground.

His gut twinged.

He followed the cook out the back, where they disappeared around a corner and he heard the distinctive clink and clash of garbage being tossed in a dumpster. The Zepitonian gave him an odd look as they passed, clapping dust off their hands, heading back inside.

Keith picked up the glowstick.

He had an ugly feeling, unlike guilt.

Looking up at the sky, and the stars, he felt how distant he was from the lions. He was very very far away from where he had gotten used to sleeping, what he was used to eating, the kinds of comfortable things that made a home. That didn’t bother him. He had grown up adjacent to that discomfort. To isolation.

Lance hadn’t.

And Lance was out here somewhere, and he was wasted.

“Lance,” he yelled. “Lance, you out here?”

Silence.

“Damn it,” he said. There was silence, but there was something _in_ that silence. Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was the sobering cold air, maybe it was something Galra. But Keith drew his blade, made peace with the possibility that he might end up stabbing an innocent bystander on Planet Amsterdam, and hunted down the alleyways.

The ruckus wasn’t loud, it was little more than the sound of grating on pavement and the soft, squeaking breath of something being half-suffocated.

The Zepitonian had Lance up against a wall. One hand was wrapped around his throat, which was enough to dangle him up at eye level, two or three feet off the ground. It was saying something to him— what, Keith didn’t know, but could easily imagine. The scene was clear, but blurred in front of his eyes, and was that the booze, or denial? There was alien saliva on Lance’s face, spit hanging off the tongue of the alien, and of the six hands, there was one slowly throttling him, one up the front of his shirt, and more unbuckling the front of their alien pants.

Keith didn’t even think about giving them a chance to live. Defusing situations was for politics.

He gutted them from behind, only passively surprised by the absence of a spinal column. His blade nipped them in half with an eerie ease, like he’d stabbed through jello. That should have killed anything, but Keith wasn’t a biologist, and he didn’t bet on it. He lobbed off the head, which came with more of a complaint, in the form of a tangle of wiry gristle that came out of the throat. The wiry stuff scrabbled on the ground, searching for the rest of the body. Keith kicked it across the alley to scuffle into silence in shadow.

The body was too heavy to drag off of Lance, so Keith grabbed Lance instead. He pulled his arm around his shoulders for the third time that night and helped him down the alleyway; Lance could walk, but he was still drunk, and he was wheezing like anybody would after having a hand that size slowly choking them out.

Keith’s adrenaline fizzed out a few blocks down. He eased Lance back down against the wall, made sure he was sitting up straight, and then sat next to him.

Keith rested his head against the back of the wall and breathed in, as slowly as he could, and back out. _Calm. Down._ The anger that usually simmered in him somewhere was a smog, now. His lungs were full of it. He had to repeat to himself that there was no point. _You killed him. You did it. He’s dead._

Never good in an emergency or ready with the right words, Keith just blurted out his apology like he thought he’d never be able to.

“I’m sorry, Lance. I was being a dick. I shouldn’t have knocked over your pyramids. You’re better at having fun than I am.”

Lance made a hiccuping noise; Keith looked over, and saw that Lance was obviously crying, tears running down his face, but there was a laugh in there somewhere. “You’re crazy, Keith,” he said through his sleeves, as he tried to rub the trauma off of his face. Keith could see his hands shaking.

“Don’t laugh at me!” said Keith, unnecessarily heated again. He was shaking, too, and he didn’t know why. “This is my fault. I fucked it up, Lance. I just never fucked it up this bad. And I’m sorry, okay?” His voice cracked.

“Keith… Hey, Keith?”

Keith looked over at Lance, still shivering and glassy-eyed. “What?”

“C-can I have your jacket?”

Keith was freezing, but he didn’t hesitate, stripping it off and then wrapping it around Lance’s shoulders. Halfway through wrapping it around him, he found himself holding on, and Lance let him hang on. Keith wasn’t sure if he was holding him for Lance’s comfort, or his own, but it was the only thing he could think of that felt remotely okay.

“Keith?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Shiro. Please. Okay?”

Keith didn’t want to tell him, either. The shame was so thick he could choke on it.

“It’s not your fault, Keith.

“....except the murder. That was kind of your fault.”

“Are you joking?” demanded Keith. He pulled back to look at him. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yeah, Keith. It is.” Lance tilted his head to look at him, and he was still shivering, but seemed slightly more in control of himself. “Shiro’s right… you need to relax.” Catching Keith’s unbelieving eye, his own still shiny with tears, Lance mimed what Shiro had taught them earlier:

_Clink, tap, shoot._

**Author's Note:**

> if you like the fic and want me to write more voltron leave me some ideas idk what people like


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